Hermione than Hermione descends from her pedestal and falls a-talking
like other people. Woman, in a word, protests; and protests are often
very dangerous things to the protesters. Nothing, for instance, can seem
more simple or more effective than the _tu quoque_ retort, and as it is
familiar to feminine disputants, we are favored with it in every
possible form. If the girl of the period is fast and frivolous, is the
young man of the period any better? No sketch can be more telling than
the picture which she is ready to draw of his lounging ways, his
epicurean indolence, his boredom at home, his foppery abroad, the
vacancy of his stare, the inanity of his talk, his incredible conceit,
his life vibrating between the Club and the stable. She hits off with a
charming vivacity the list of his accomplishments--his skill at
flirtation, his matchless ability at croquet, his assiduity over _Bell's
Life_, the cleverness of his book on the Derby. No sensible or
well-informed girl, she tells us, can talk for ten minutes to this
creature without weariness and disgust at his ignorance, his narrowness,
his triviality; no modestly-dressed or decently-mannered girl can win
the slightest share of his attentions. Married, he is as frivolous as
before marriage; he selects the toilette of the _demi-monde_ as an
agreeable topic of domestic conversation, he resents affection and
proclaims home a bore, he grudges the birth of children as an additional
expense, he stunts and degrades the education of his girls, he is the
despot of his household and the dread of his family.
The sketch is powerful enough in its way, but the conclusion which the
fair artist draws is at least an odd one. We prepare ourselves to hear
that woman has resolved to extirpate such a monster as this, or that she
will remain an obstinate vestal till a nobler breed of wooers arises.
What woman owns that she really does is to mould herself as much on the
monster's model as she can. According to her own account, she puts
nature's picture of herself into the hands of this imbecile, invites him
to blur it as he will, and lets him write under the daub "_Ego feci._"
As he cannot talk sense, she stoops to bandy chaff and slang. As he
refuses to be attracted by modesty of dress and manner, she apes the
dress and manner of the _demi-monde_. His indolence, his triviality, his
worldliness become her own. As he finds home a bore, she too plunges
into her round of dissipation; as he objects to children, she declines
to be a mother; as he wishes to get the girls off his hands, she flings
them at the head of the first comer.
Now, if such a defence as this at all adequately represents the facts of
the case, we can only say that the girl of the period must be a far
lower creature than we have ever asserted her to be. A sensible girl
stooping to slang, a modest girl flinging aside modesty, simply to
conquer a fool and a fop, is a satire upon woman which none but a woman
could have invented, and which we must confess to be utterly incredible
to men. But the assumption upon which the whole of this mimetic theory
is based is one well worthy of a little graver consideration.
"Tell me how to improve the youth of France," said Napoleon one day to
Madame de Campan. "Give them good mothers," was the reply. There are
some things which even a Napoleon may be pardoned for feeling a little
puzzled in undertaking, and Madame de Campan would no doubt have added
much to the weight of her reply by a few practical words as to the
machinery requisite for the supply of the article she recommended. But
her request is now the cry of the world. The general uneasiness of which
we have spoken before arises simply from the conviction that woman is
becoming more and more indifferent to her actual post in the social
economy of the world, and the criticisms in which it takes form, whether
grave or gay, could all be summed up in Madame de Campan's request,
"Give us good mothers."
After all protests against limiting the sphere of the sex to a single
function of their existence, public opinion still regards woman
primarily in her relation to the generation to come. If it censures the
sensible girl who stoops to slang, or the modest girl who stoops to
indecency, it is because the sense and the modesty which they abandon is
not theirs to hold or to fling away, but the heritage of the human race.
But this seems to be less and less the feeling of woman herself. For
good or for evil, or, perhaps more truly, for both good and evil, woman
is becoming conscious every day of new powers, and longing for an
independent sphere in which she can exert them. Marriage is aimed at
with a passionate ardor unknown before, not as a means of gratifying
affection, but as a means of securing independence.
To the unmarried girl life is a sheer bondage, and there is no sacrifice
too great to be left untried if it only promises a chance of
deliverance. She learns to despise the sense, the information, the
womanly reserve which fail to attract the deliverer. She has to sell
herself to purchase her freedom; and she will take very strong measures
to secure a purchaser. The fop, the fool, little knows the keen scrutiny
with which the gay creature behind her fan is taking stock of his feeble
preferences, is preparing to play upon his feebler aversions. Pitiful as
he is, it is for him that she arranges her artillery on the
toilette-table, the "little secrets," the powder bloom, the rouge
"precipitated from the damask rose-leaf," the Styrian lotion that gives
"beauty and freshness to the complexion, plumpness to the figure,
clearness and softness to the skin." He has a faint flicker of liking
for brunettes; she lays her triumphant fingers on her "walnut stain,"
and darkens into the favorite tint. He loves plumpness, and her "Sinai
Manna" is at hand to secure _embonpoint_. Belladonna flashes on him from
her eyes, Kohl and antimony deepen the blackness of her eyebrows, "bloom
of roses" blushes from her lips. She stoops to conquer, and it is no
wonder that the fop and the fool go down.
The freedom she covets comes with marriage, but it is a freedom
threatened by a thousand accidents, and threatened, above all, by
maternity. It is of little use to have bowed to slang and
shoulder-straps, if it be only to tie oneself to a cradle. The nursery
stands sadly in the way of the free development of woman; it clips her
social enjoyment, it curtails her bonnet bills. "The slavery of nursing
a child," one fair protester tells us, "only a mother knows." And so she
invents a pretty theory about the damage done to modern constitutions by
our port-drinking forefathers, and ceases to nurse at all. But even this
is only partial independence; she pants for perfect freedom from the
cares of maternity. Her tone becomes the tone of the household, and the
spouse she has won growls over each new arrival. She is quite ready to
welcome the growl. "Nature," a mother informs us, "turns restive after
the birth of two or three children," and mothers turn restive with
nature. "Whatever else you may do," she adds, "you will never persuade
us into liking to have children," and, if we did, we should not greatly
value the conversion. And so woman wins her liberty, and bows her
emphatic reply to the world's appeal, "Give us good mothers," by
declining to be a mother at all.
By the sacrifice of womanliness, by the sacrifice of modesty, by
flattering her wooer's base preferences before marriage, by encouraging
his baser selfishness afterwards, by hunting her husband to the club and
restricting her maternal energies to a couple of infants, woman has at
last bought her freedom. She is no slave to a husband as her mother was,
she is not buried beneath the cares of a family like her grandmother.
She has changed all that, and the old world of home and domestic
tenderness and parental self-sacrifice lies in ruins at her feet. She
has her liberty; what will she do with it? As yet, freedom means simply
more slang, more jewelry, more selfish extravagance, less modesty. As we
meet her on the stairs, as we see the profuse display of her charms, as
we listen to the flippant, vapid chatter, we turn a little sickened from
woman stripped of all that is womanly, and cry to Heaven, as Madame de
Campan cried to the Emperor--"Give us good mothers."
UNEQUAL MARRIAGES.
Acute ladies who concern themselves much with the superficial social
currents of the time are beginning to perceive, or at least to think
that they perceive, a fatal and growing tendency to _mesalliances_ on
the part of men who ought to know better. They complain not merely of
the doting old gentleman who has been a bachelor long enough to lose his
wits, and so marries his cook or his housemaid, nor of the debauched
young simpleton who takes a wife from a casino or the bar of a
night-_cafe_. Actions of this sort are as common at one time as at
another. Old fools and young fools maintain a pretty steady average.
Their silly exploits are the issue, not of the tendencies of the age,
but of their own individual and particular lack of wits. They do not
affect the general direction of social feeling, nor have we any right to
argue up from their preposterous connexions to the influences and
conditions of the society of which they are only the abnormal and
irregular growths. What people mean, when they talk of an increase in
the number of men who marry beneath them, is that men otherwise sensible
and respectable and sober-minded perpetrate the irregularity in
something like cold blood, and with a measure of deliberation. Whether
observers who have formed this opinion are right, or are only
anticipating their own apprehensions and alarms, is difficult to
ascertain. A good deal depends on the accidental range of the observer's
own acquaintances, and still more on their candor or discreet reticence.
Besides, how are we to know how far one generation is worse than
generations which have gone before it? Men are, after due time, forgiven
for this defiance of social usage, and women who were barely presentable
in youth become presentable enough by the time they reach middle age.
People may seem to us to be very equally and justly mated who
five-and-twenty years ago were the town's talk. It is practically
impossible, therefore, to compare the actual number of unequal marriages
in our day with those of a generation back. People may have their ideas,
but verification is not to be had. All we can do is to estimate the
increase in the conditions which are likely to make men find wives in a
rank below their own. If we look at these, there may be a good many
reasons for believing that the apprehensions of the shrewd and alarmed
observers are not without justification.
When a wise man with a living or a name to make, or both, looks for a
wife, he certainly does not desire a person who shall be troublesome and
an impediment to him. He wants a cheerful, sensible, and decently
thrifty person. He probably has no inclination for a bluestocking, nor
for a lady with aggressive views on points of theology, nor for one who
can beat him in political discussion. Strong intellectual power he can
most heartily dispense with. But then, on the other hand, he has no
fancy for sitting day after day at table with a vapid, flippant,
frivolous, empty soul who can neither talk nor listen, who takes no
interest in things herself, and cannot understand why other people
should take interest in them, who is penetrated with feeble little
egoisms. An aggressive woman with opinions about prevenient grace, or
the advantages of female emigration, or the functions of the deaconess,
would be far preferable to this. She would irritate, but she would not
fill the soul with everlasting despair, as the pretty vapid creature
does. To discuss predestination and election over dinner is not nice,
but still less is it nice to have to make talk with a fool, and to be
obliged to answer her according to her folly.
As the education of modern girls of fashion chiefly aims at making them
either very fast or very slow, it is not to be wondered at that men find
it hard to realize their ideals among their equals in position. It is
not merely that so many marriageable young ladies are ignorant. They are
this, but they are more. They are exacting and pretentious, and
uneducated in the worst sense, for they are ignorant how ignorant they
are, or even that they are ignorant at all.
Then there is a still more obvious, palpable, and impressive
circumstance. A man with ordinary means looks with alarm on the too
visible and too unbounded extravagance of the ladies from among whom he
is expected to take a partner. The thought of the apparel, of the
luxuries, of the attendants, of the restless moving about, to which they
have been accustomed, fills him with deep consternation. He might
perhaps deceive himself into thinking that he could get on very well
with an empty-minded woman, but he cannot forget the stern facts of
arithmetic, nor hoodwink himself as to what would be left out of his
income after he had paid for dresses, servants, household charges,
carriages, parties, opera-boxes, traveling, and all the rest.
Besides the flippancy of so many women, and the extravagance of most
women, arising from their inexperience of the trouble with which money
is made and of the importance of keeping it after it has been made,
there is something in the characteristics of modern social intercourse
which makes men of a certain temper intensely anxious to avoid a sort of
marriage which would, among other things, have the effect of committing
them more deeply to this kind of intercourse. Such men shrink with
affright from giving hostages to society for a more faithful compliance
with its most dismal exactions. To them there is nothing more
unendurable than the monotonous round of general hospitalities and
ceremonials, ludicrously misnamed pleasure. A detestation of wearisome
formalities does not imply any clownish or misanthropic reluctance to
remember that those who feel it live in a world with other people, and
that a thoroughly social life is the only just and full life.
But there is all the difference between a really social life and a
hollow phantasmic imitation of it. A person may have the pleasantest
possible circle of friends, and may like their society above all things.
This is one thing. But to have to mix much with numbers of thoroughly
indifferent people, and in a superficial, hollow way, is a very
different thing. Of course, men who take life just as it comes, who are
not very sedulous about making the most of it in their own way, and are
quite willing to do all that their neighbors do just because their
neighbors do it, find no annoyance in this. Men cast in another mould
find not only annoyance but absolute misery. They know also that
marriage with a woman who is in the full tide of society means an
infinite augmentation of this round of tiresome and thoroughly useless
ceremonies. Add this consideration to the two other considerations of
elaborate vapidness and unfathomable extravagance, and you have three
tolerably good arguments why a man with large discourse of reason,
looking before and after, should be slow to fasten upon himself bonds
which threaten to prove so leaden.
The faults of the women of his own position, however, are a very poor
reason why he should marry a woman beneath his own position. A man must
be very weak to believe that, because fine ladies are often inane and
extravagant, therefore women who are not fine ladies must be wise,
clever, prudent, and everything else that belongs to the type of
companionable womanhood. The fact of the mistress being a blank does not
prove that the maid would be a prize. It may be wise to avoid the one,
but it is certainly folly to seek the other. Granting that the
housemaid or the cook or the daughter of the coachman is virtuous,
high-minded, refined, thoughtful, thrifty, and everything else that is
desirable under the sun, all will fail to counterbalance the drawbacks
that flow from the first inequality of position.
The misguided husband believes that he is going to live a plain
unsophisticated life, according to nature and common sense, in company
with one whom the hollowness and trickishness of society has never
infected. He is not long in finding out his irreparable blunder. The
lady is not received. People do not visit her, and although one of his
motives in choosing a sort of wife whom people do not visit was the
express desire of avoiding visits, yet he no sooner gets what he wished
than his success begins to make him miserable. What he expected to
please him as a relief mortifies him as a slight. Even if he be
unsympathetic enough in nature not to care much for the disapproval of
his fellows, he will rapidly find that his wife is a good deal less of a
philosopher in these points, and that, though he may relish his escape
from the miseries of society, she will vigorously resent her exclusion
from its supposed delights.
Again, from another point of view, he is tolerably sure to find that the
common opinion of society about unequal unions is not so unsound as he
used scornfully to suppose it to be. The vapidity of a polite woman is
bad, but the vapidity of a woman who is not polite is decidedly worse. A
simpering unthinking woman with good manners is decidedly better than
an unthinking woman with imperfect manners; and if polish can spoil
nature among one set of people, certainly among another set nature may
be as much spoilt by lack of polish. It does not follow, from a person
being indifferently well-bred, that therefore she is profoundly wise and
thoughtful and poetic, and capable of estimating the things of this
world at their worth. Boys at college indulge in this too generous
fallacy. For grown-up men there is less excuse. They ought to know that
obscure uneducated women are all the more likely on that account to fall
short of magnanimity, self-control, self-containing composure, than
girls who have grown up with a background of bright and gracious
tradition, however little their education may have done to stimulate
them to make the foreground like it. To have a common past is the first
secret of happy association--a past common in ideas, sentiments, and
growth, if not common in external incidents.
One reason why a cultivated man is wretched with a vapid woman is that
she has not traveled over a yard of that ground of knowledge and feeling
which has in truth made his nature what it is. But a woman in his own
station is more likely to have shared a past of this sort than a woman
of lower station. Mere community of general circumstances and
surrounding does something. The obscure woman taken from inferior place
has not the common past of culture, nor of circumstance either. The
foolish man who has married away from his class trusts that somehow or
other nature will repair this. He assumes, in a real paroxysm of folly,
that obscurity is the fostering condition of a richness of character
which could not be got by culture. He pays the price of his blindness.
Untended nature is more likely to produce weeds than choice fruits, and
the chances in such cases as this are beyond calculation in favor of his
having got a weed--in other words, having wedded himself to a life of
wrangling, gloom, and swift deterioration of character. This result may
not be invariable, but it must be more usual than not.
In the exceptional cases where a man does not repent of an unequal match
of this sort, you will mostly find that the match was unequal only in
externals, and that his character had been a very fit counterpart for
that of a vulgar and uneducated woman before he made her his wife. This
may lead one to think that there is something to be said for the woman
in morganatic marriages. The men who do these things are not always, not
even generally, philosophic men in search of an unsophisticated life,
but unamiable, defiant persons, who only hate society either because it
has failed to appreciate their qualities, or because they cannot be at
the trouble to go through the ordinary amount of polite usage.
HUSBAND-HUNTING.
What we have said in another place about the odium which attaches to
"match-making" naturally applies in a far greater degree to
"husband-hunting." Practically the two words mean much the same thing,
since the successful result of a husband-hunt is of course a match, and
match-making, in the common acceptation of the term, involves a
husband-hunt. This latter fact is somewhat curious. There is no reason
in the nature of things why the word match-making should be associated
only with the pursuit of the unmarried male. On the contrary, the theory
of marriage has always been that it is the woman who has to be hunted
down. It is curious to note under what completely different
circumstances, and occasionally in what grotesque forms, the same theory
has been found all over the world, both in civilized and savage life.
Sometimes the bride is carried away bodily from her home, as if nothing
short of physical force could make a woman quit her maiden state.
Sometimes the panting bridegroom has to run her down--no slight task if
the adorer happens to be stout, and the adored one coquettish and fleet
of foot. In marriage, this custom prevails only, we believe, among the
savages, but visitors to the Crystal Palace may see how modern
civilization has adapted it to courtship in the popular pastime of
kiss-in-the-ring.
We have read of a savage tribe in which the bride is thought no better
than she should be, if, on the day after the wedding, the bridegroom
does not show signs of having been vigorously pinched and scratched.
This custom, again, is perhaps represented in civilized life by the
kissing and struggling which are supposed every Christmas to go on under
the mistletoe. It is not unworthy of remark, as regards these two points
of comparison between civilization and barbarism, that, as the woman
gets more civilized, she seems more disposed to meet her pursuer
halfway. In the game of kiss-in-the-ring, for instance, although the
lady does not run after the gentleman, but, on the contrary, shows her
maiden modesty by giving him as hard a chase as she can, she still
delicately paves the way for osculation by throwing the
pocket-handkerchief. And, in the Christmas fights under the mistletoe
(if we may take Mr. Dickens as an authority), slapping, and even
pinching in moderation, are considered allowable--perhaps we ought to
say proper--on the lady's part; but scratching--serious scratching, we
mean, which would make her admirer's face look next morning as if he had
been taking liberties with a savage bird or a cat--is thought not merely
unnecessary, but unfair.
The difference between civilized and savage woman may perhaps help to
indicate the reason why, now-a-days, match-making should, as a matter of
fact, be associated with husband-hunting in spite of the theory that it
is the woman who has to be hunted, not the man. Popular phraseology has
an awkward trick of making people unconsciously countenance the theories
against which they most vehemently protest. Husband-hunting is a far
more generally obnoxious word than even the much-injured match-making,
simply because it flies in the face of the pet theory which we have
described. But, if the theory really hold good in modern practice, why
should man, not woman, be recognised as the professional match-maker's
victim and legitimate game? Why does not wife-hunting, the word which
this theory entitles us to expect, take its proper place in society?
Heiress-hunting, indeed, is well known, but this can scarcely be
considered a form of wife-hunting, for it is not the woman who is the
object of pursuit, but her money-bags. We have the word heiress-hunting
for the very obvious reason that heiresses are recognised game. The word
husband-hunting exists for the same reason.